Active Travel and Net Zero 2050 and how these policies affect Motorists

What many motorists may not appreciate is that many of the BCP’s ‘traffic improvements’ will not help motorists, but are part of the Active Travel programme. These have caused significant congestion along Ringwood Rd and Wallisdown Rd. Active Travel is a central government’s programme to improve cycling, walking and wheeling (scooters). This turns out to be mainly cycle lanes. £90million has been spent in BCP alone since 2020 and £2.3billion nationally, of you, the tax payer’s money. Personally I have nothing against cycle lanes, I’m a cyclist, but when we have pot holed roads and these schemes are completely under utilised you have to question the priorities. BCP will tell you it doesn’t matter because the local council tax payer doesn’t pay, but these are funded from grants from the previous central government, a Conservative government. At this point you should be asking why, well it’s part of Net Zero. Active Travel programme has a target of 50% of town and city journeys to be completed by cycling, walking or ‘wheeling’ (Active Travel) by 2030. The interim target is that 46% of town and city journeys are by Active Travel by 2025, but that is going to be missed, by a long way. The Active Travel lobby (mainly cycling zealots) will tell you that’s because the government is not throwing enough of your money at it. What they won’t tell you is that to meet this objective they will make it increasingly difficult for you to make your journeys by car. This will be through; LTNs, 20mph limits, road pricing, ULEZ, Congestion Charging, removal of bus lay-bys and restricting junctions. Net Zero is of course becoming increasingly controversial, as people start to realise it is going to become increasingly expensive for all of us. A few facts; the UK emits 0.9% of the worlds CO2, it reduced its CO2 by 50% since 1990, it is now lower than it was in the 1870s. Whilst the Chinese increased their CO2 by 300% since 2000. They built 47GW of new coal powered stations in 2023, which is more to the total of the UK’s power average requirement, which is 30GW. Their plan is to continue to increase their CO2 output until 2030 and only then decrease their CO2 to Net Zero by 2060. America has now left the Paris accord and Trump has committed to maximise its fossil fuel exploitation, with “Drill, Baby Drill”. At this point you might ask why are we bothering with this? It is clear that all we, the UK, is doing is ‘virtue signalling’ whilst our industries are collapsing under the weight of net zero and making the UK poorer. An expert recently reckoned that the cost of net zero for the UK was in excess of £4 trillion, even the government thinks it is £1.4 trillion. Given the Government’s ability to accurately forecast future expenditure, I know which forecast I am inclined to believe is accurate! If all our virtuous efforts are not effective then perhaps we should divert the resources to making the country climate resilient; ready for floods, droughts, storms and other extreme weather events. The most the UK could ever do is reduce the world’s CO2 by 0.9%!